Dark-Matter Astrophysics at the Small-Scale Frontier

Diverse astrophysical observations have established the existence of dark matter, yet its nature continues to be unknown. Indeed, even the cold dark matter paradigm has not yet been established, with challenges to it emerging at small length scales through various precision astrometric measurements. The growing trove of observations from the Gaia space telescope and other surveys is continuing to reveal the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way galaxy in ever more exquisite detail. Here I propose, in collaboration with my Fermilab colleague Brian Yanny and others, to leverage these observations through the use of the stellar pair correlation function, whose application in this context we have pioneered, to infer new limits on the cold dark matter paradigm at sub-kpc scales and to study the implications of these limits for theoretical models of dark matter.